


Tattoos and Moonlight

by misha_collins_butt



Series: And the Stars Will Fade and the Moon Will Fall but Please Stay With Me Tonight [12]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, College AU, First Kiss, Fluff, Human AU, Late night kiss, M/M, One Shot, Supernatural AU - Freeform, Tattooed!Cas, human!Cas, nerd!dean, punk!Cas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2019-08-16
Packaged: 2020-09-02 07:08:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20271952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misha_collins_butt/pseuds/misha_collins_butt
Summary: Tattooed!Cas and Nerd!Dean star in this college AU where Dean learns to love school through falling in love with his rowdy roommate.





	Tattoos and Moonlight

Dean finds college tacky and, quite frankly, boring. Not because he struggles to keep up but because he struggles not to fly ahead of the entire class. He’s been a straight A student and a fast paced learner for as long as he can remember. So when he meets his new dorm mate for the year, he’s initially not impressed.

Castiel’s tattooed from neck to ankle, pierced from nose to ear, and he’s got the most gorgeous shit-eating grin Dean’s ever had the pleasure to encounter. But he’s a slacker of a sort and he doesn’t seem to give two shakes of a rats ass about his grades.

Although, maybe Dean can take a page from his book. Cas is relaxed and comfortable, affably conscious of the world around him, an incredible artist in his own right - he even asked if he could paint Dean at some point. And he’s oddly familiar. Not the kind of familiar where it’s on the tip of your tongue and you have a strong feeling you’ve seen this before, but the kind of familiar where it sits in the back of your mind for days before you have a sudden, out-of-context realisation during a random activity.

Dean has a few days off from classes when two of the teachers are caught having an affair and he figures he doesn’t have many friends and his brother is a few hundred miles away still in high school, so he’ll just spend this extra time with Cas. They talk and talk and eat and laugh and drink and talk. Cas paints his face onto a new canvas and Dean blushes at how Cas seems to see him because he’s never thought of himself as attractive in any way.

The talking gets deep one night, around 2 in the morning, when they’re both slightly drunk on cheap college beer and the gleaming stars are twinkling around the moon. They talk about past loves and faraway wisps of memories, wistful dreams and hapless fights lost, and they talk about the universe and the beauty in solitude, the peace in silence. After a few moments of quiet, Dean has the realisation.

He asks what school Cas went to and the first answer is Castiel’s high school but it would have been before that. Dean eventually narrows it down to elementary school. Yeah, that seems right. And when Cas says he went to Parsons Elementary school during kindergarten, first, second, and third grade, Dean realises for a fact where he knows this guy from. They went to kindergarten together.

They stay up into the wee hours, and they don’t have the energy to laugh anymore so instead, they shove the mattress off of Dean’s bed and lay it out under the giant window, wrapping themselves in a few blankets and lying down next to eachother to watch the stars. The last thing Dean feels before he falls asleep, folded in Cas’s arms like a Christmas present, is a pair of soft lips pressing against his temple.

He wakes the next day around 11 in the morning, limbs tangled with Cas’s, he watches his friend sleep. He seems much softer with his eyes closed and his cheek squished against the pillow, lips parted, light snores escaping every once in a while. Dean breathes in to get his courage up, then leans forward and kisses Cas’ nose. He stirs but doesn’t wake.

They stay up late again the next night, listening to Pachelbel and Brahms, Mozart and Tchaikovsky, Chopin and Vivaldi. They watch the stars again, and then each other, and Cas’s hand manages to find Dean’s face and eventually his lips find Dean’s too, and they kiss, slow and soft, for a long time.

The raucous, charming punk and the quiet, shy nerd as a couple? Huge news in the weeks following on campus. They don’t mind though, and they go from holding pinkies to twining fingers, from fleeting pecks on the cheek to sweet kisses on the lips, from tentative arms hooked in arms to loose arms around waists, in public. 

Dean can learn to like college, long as it means he has Cas there to make it a little less painful.


End file.
